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Why can't God experience emotions?

Posted on: October 6, 2006 - 2:22am

The_Prize

Posts: 8

Joined: 2006-08-20

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Why can't God experience emotions?

I have been hearing quite a lot from the atheist-theist debate circles about a God being unable to feel emotions. The reason, so I heard, is because God is perfect. Some even extend this into arguing that God, being perfect is unable to create. His perfection actually prevents him from doing so (Perfection limiting a being? Seems contradictory). I don't really get why this is so. Could anyone teach and enlighten me and possibly everyone else reading this thread on why a perfect God cannot feel any emotions?

I have been hearing quite a lot from the atheist-theist debate circles about a God being unable to feel emotions. The reason, so I heard, is because God is perfect. Some even extend this into arguing that God, being perfect is unable to create. His perfection actually prevents him from doing so (Perfection limiting a being? Seems contradictory). I don't really get why this is so. Could anyone teach and enlighten me and possibly everyone else reading this thread on why a perfect God cannot feel any emotions?

Although I am not interested in logical "proofs" of the existence or nonexistence of god, there is an important non-academic common-sense issue to be addressed here.

Of all the objects in the universe, only living things have needs, desires and goals. Rocks and lakes, planets and stars, galaxies and nebulae are indifferent to their own fates. Only us evolved beings have interests.

What programmed us living beings to care about ourselves, each other and about the world at large? Natural selection, obviously. Being indifferent to one's surroundings is a very bad survival strategy.

But what about god? Theists tell us there is a god who "wants" us to worship him (and to stone to death disobedient children, etc.), "listens" to prayer, and so forth and so on. But they also tell us that their god is one of a kind, neither evolved nor designed. But how could that be? Non-evolved things do not care about anything: they have no interests.

Theists tell us god is moral, but how is that possible? We humans got our morality from natural selection, but where the devil did god get his? Our morality benefits our genes because it allows us to cooperate with other humans, but why would a god need a capacity for cooperation? With whom would an omnipotent being cooperate and why?

God, as theists imagine him, is a social being -- a meme machine like us. He acts like a human -- like a spoiled child, actually. Clearly god did not make us in his image. We made him in our image.